This invention relates to meat scraping machines for scraping the freshly cut surfaces of a piece of meat, and more particularly to a pivoted drive and mount for mounting a movable section of such a machine relative to a fixed section and for coupling the drive from one section to the other in a sanitary fashion.
The faces of cut meat have customarily been scraped, washed, or otherwise cleaned for reasons of sanitation and appearance. The meat cutting process, particularly cutting by bandsaw, usually leaves residues of congealed blood, bone dust, marrow, meat particles, coagulated fat, and so on, on the freshly cut meat surfaces, and these residues are unappealing to purchasers as they view the meat in the market. It has therefore been common practice to scrape freshly cut meat manually before it is put on display.
In view of the time and labor involved in manually scraping each piece of meat, it has long been desirable to automate the cleaning process. Until recently, however, most efforts in this direction have been unsuccessful. Foremost among the causes have been the problems of accommodating meats of all sizes and thicknesses, and of meeting the very strict sanitation requirements of the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF). A successful machine must therefore be highly versatile, thorough, and quick, and it must also be completely sanitary in operation and quickly and easily cleanable after use.
Meat scraping machines such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,389,414; 3,439,369; 3,478,380; 3,606,628 and 3,781,936 represent significant improvements in automating the cleaning of cut meats and reducing the manual labor and time necessary. U.S. Pat. No. 3,781,936, in particular, discloses a meat scraping machine which has solved a number of prior art problems. It cleans both cut faces of the meat automatically and quickly, and accepts the commonly encountered thicknesses. Most of the manual labor has been eliminated, and the machine produces a product which is highly appealing to the consumer.
In such a machine, where both sides of the meat are simultaneously driven and cleaned, the two machine sections are synchronized, lest one surface of the meat be driven at a speed different from the other. The two sections are also movable with respect to one another so that they may be selectively separated to accommodate different meat thicknesses. As indicated earlier, however, it is necessary that all exposed portions be easily maintainable in a highly sanitary condition. This means that the drive system must be isolated from the external environment since it is all but impossible to clean many of the drive chains, gears, motors, and so on usually employed.
One solution is to use separate, synchronized drive systems within each section, each being separately isolated from the external environment. This is expensive, however, due to the need for two drives, each of which is synchronized. Another solution is to couple the drive systems of the two sections together, making provision for displacement of one with respect to the other to accommodate different meat thicknesses.